The Lost WomanPatricia Beer

Patricia Beer• Born in Exmouth, Devon• Hey family belonged to the Plymouth Brethren

(conservative religious community)• Her dominant mother was proud of her clever,

literary daughter and intended her to be a teacher. • Moved away from her religious background as a

young adult, focusing more on being an academic.• Attended Exeter & Oxford Universities• Lectured English in Italy, before returning to lecture

English at Goldsmith’s College in London.

1924 - 1999

What’s the poem about?

• The speaker’s mother dies, and returns to haunt her as a voice

• The poem is autobiographical in nature – Patricia Beer lost her mother at the age of 14

• Death and the haunting of the living by the dead were subjects Beer returned to repeatedly in her seven collections of poetry, and these themes can be seen clearly in ‘The Lost Woman’.

The Lost WomanMy mother went with no more warningThan a bright voice and a bad pain.Home from school on a June morningAnd where the brook goes under the laneI saw the back of a shocking whiteAmbulance drawing away from the gate.

She never returned and I never sawHer buried. So a romance began.The ivy-woman turned into a treeThat still hops away like a rainbow downThe avenue as I approach.My tendrils are the ones that clutch.

I made a life for her over the years.Frustrated no more by a dull marriageShe ran a canteen through several wars.The wit of a cliché-ridden villageShe met her match at an extra-muralClass and the OU summer school.

Many a hero in his timeAnd every poet has acquiredA lost woman to haunt the home,To be compensated and desired,Who will not alter, who will not grow,A corpse they need never get to know.

She is nearly always benign. Her habitIs not to stride at dead of night.Soft and crepuscular in rabbit-Light she comes out. Hear how they hateThemselves for losing her as they did.Her country is bland and she does not chide.

But my lost woman evermore snapsFrom somewhere else: ‘You did not love me.I sacrificed too much perhaps.I showed you the way to rise above meAnd you took it. You are the ghostWith the bat-voice, my dear, I am not lost.’

Form & Structure

• 6 stanzas of 6 lines each• Elegy - a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament

for the dead.• Each different stanza has a different implied meaning,

(e.g. the first stanza represents her mother leaving.)• Basic rhyme structure is ABABCC but the effect is

softened through half-rhyme and enjambment. • Loose rhyming pattern ('pain/lane, white/gate and

years/wars‘)

Tone, Mood & Figurative Language

• Tone – confusion & grief, tension, feeling of abandonment “my mother went”, guilt and frustration at the end.

• Mood – Sad, a sense of being lost without a mother figure, as if she left too soon

• Descriptive adjectives & adverbs (shocking, bright, haunt)

• Personification & metaphor• Juxtaposition : “bright voice and a bad pain”

Check out more resources here…

• https://prezi.com/ywexaqoxoiuh/the-lost-woman/

• https://prezi.com/rfun-_t1z9b3/the-lost-woman/

• https://www.powtoon.com/show/grkvQljY5gF/patricia-beer-the-lost-woman/

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDpjKtRiX6k

Essay Questions:

1. Patricia Beer lost her mother when she was fourteen years old. How does the poetess take her readers into a fairy-tale land?

2. How does Patricia Beer juxtapose the contrast between emotional detachment & fictitious fancy in her poem ‘ The Lost Woman’?

3. How does Patricia Beer’s attitude towards death make her poem ‘The Lost Woman’ intense?